When I heard I would be traveling to Miami for the Apartment Revenue Management Conference in September, I was transported back in time.
The year was 1998. I was 15 years younger, five pounds heavier and really digging Will Smith’s new single, “Miami.” I didn’t know anything about the city, but from what I gathered based on the lyrics, every day like a Mardi Gras—everybody party all day. On the...

Four Walls Can Make It BrightDuring my family dinners growing up, one of my sisters had a horrible time calming down long enough to sit at the table for the duration of our meal. A solution that my parents gave her was to run laps around the house as many times as it took to exhaust herself of all her pent up energy. This was a bit of a comical excursion because we had a low-rise fence along a...

During a hiking trip through Utah a few years ago, my friends and I went to a diner for lunch. I was hemming and hawing over the pancake options when our waiter arrived at the table. He was just your average server—tall, brown hair, three teardrops tattooed under his right eye.
You know, the usual.
Deeply distressed that the same man who put three people in the ground would also be delivering my...

A few years ago I walked into the kitchen to find my old roommate shoving an entire tray of uneaten lasagna down the garbage disposal.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, as she repeatedly stabbed the noodles with a fork to dislodge them from the container.
“This is what a garbage disposal is for,” she confidently explained.
Incorrect. So incorrect, in fact, that our disposal broke two...